ZAP! Sir Richard Branson decides to take on America’s superhero comic publishing giants. Bam! He needs a Hollywood sidekick to boost the profile of his newly formed Virgin Comics. Kapow! Enter Nicolas Cage, the Oscar-winning actor, who happens to have a 16-year-old son with a talent for drawing cartoons.

An improbable alliance between the British entrepreneur and the comic-obsessed Cage family will come to fruition this week with the publication on Wednesday of a new series of voodoo-themed comics set in New Orleans after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

The series is based on characters and stories dreamt up by Cage’s son Weston. It was developed by Virgin Comics, an India-based publishing venture linking Branson and several of the biggest names in Indian entertainment, among them Deepak Chopra, the bestselling author, and Shekhar Kapur, the film and theatre director.

The Cages are jointly credited as “creative producers” of the Voodoo Child series, which tells the story of a curse imposed at the outset of the American civil war returning to haunt the streets of modern-day New Orleans. A detective investigating a series of murders begins to real-ise they were connected with a violent rebellion on a Southern plantation more than 100 years earlier.

“Weston has always been a huge inspiration to me,” Cage said of his son. “He has been drawing comics since he was three.”

Cage has long been renowned in Hollywood for his devotion to comic-strip culture. When his third wife Alice gave birth to a boy two years ago, the Cages named him Kal-el, which every comic-book addict knows was the name that Superman was given as a baby on the planet Krypton.

Although Cage won his Oscar in 1996 for his dramatic performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, he has more recently been drawn to comic hero roles. At one point he was being considered for the lead role in last year’s remake of Superman.

Disagreements about the script prompted his withdrawal, but he went on to play another comic character in this year’s Ghost Rider, the story of a motorcycle stuntman who makes a deal with the devil and is transformed at nights into a fire-breathing hunter of rogue demons.

Cage recalled that he had first come across the Ghost Rider comics as a seven-year-old: “I saw this comic with this colourful flaming skull on the cover and he’s coming right at you – I was transfixed. It is really how I got into reading and I still have that actual comic.”

Over the years Cage accumulated one of America’s most valuable collections of early comics, among them an original copy of the first Superman comic, published in 1938. Several years ago he sold part of the collection at auction for more than $1.6m (£800,000).

Cage’s comic enthusiasm has proved a boon to Branson’s efforts to challenge Marvel and DC, the two companies that dominate the $2.5 billion US comic business. Virgin’s deal with the Gotham Entertainment Group, a leading south Asian comic publisher run by Chopra’s son Gotham, is aimed at combining western enthusiasm for stories of superheroes with the more spiritual themes that have become popular in the rapidly growing Asian comic market.

Inspired by the global success of Japanese anime and manga graphic novels and films, Indian entrepreneurs are seeking to repackage Hindu mythology and other aspects of their culture for a western audience. “We truly believe that in the years ahead India will become a leading global cultural exporter,” said Sharad Devarajan of Virgin Comics.

Cage, 43, has emerged as a key player in the marriage of western and eastern cultures. He has already agreed to play the leading role in a film version of The Sadhu, based on a bestselling Indian comic about James Jensen, an English soldier in colonial India who deserts from the army, studies with mystics and gains supernatural powers.

Cage said recently that he was also interested in a film version of his son’s voodoo comics. Weston, a former high school wrestler with black belts in several martial arts, paid tribute to his father for helping him develop his “dark imagination”.

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